It is well known that for many chemical reactions to occur at practical rates at least one of the reactants must be dissolved in an inert solvent. For many organic reactions, those solvents are liquid hydrocarbons or halogenated hydrocarbons, such as chloroform, methylene chloride and chloromethane.
In many cases, the use of such solvents give satisfactory yield of product but presents problems and expense in solvent costs, manipulation, recovery and disposal. There are certain reactions important to biochemistry, such as polypeptide syntheses, in which such solvents pose certain problems. Polypeptides are frequently prepared by sequential addition of protected amino acids to a growing peptide chain attached to a solid substrate, such as a polystyrene or porous glass substrate. As presently practiced, these reactions do not go 100% to completion.
For example, conventional techniques using solid supports sometime suffer from incomplete reaction because of the solvent's inability to penetrate the resin. As a consequence, the final product often is a complex mixture of polypeptides which is difficult to purify. The synthesis is further complicated by the presence of organic reaction solvents which also must be removed. Moreover, such solvents tend to be fairly expensive and can materially increase the cost to manufacture certain products.
It would be highly desirable to have a low cost solvent which is readily removed from the reaction products, which can easily dissolve reagents, and which has high penetrating power, and thus is more easily able to penetrate porous solid reaction substrates or solid reactants.